Coping with Construals in Broad-Coverage Semantic Annotation of Adpositions
Abstract
We consider the semantics of prepositions, revisiting a broad-coverage annotation scheme used for annotating all 4,250 preposition tokens in a 55,000 word corpus of English. Attempts to apply the scheme to adpositions and case markers in other languages, as well as some problematic cases in English, have led us to reconsider the assumption that a preposition's lexical contribution is equivalent to the role/relation that it mediates. Our proposal is to embrace the potential for construal in adposition use, expressing such phenomena directly at the token level to manage complexity and avoid sense proliferation. We suggest a framework to represent both the scene role and the adposition's lexical function so they can be annotated at scale---supporting automatic, statistical processing of domain-general language---and sketch how this representation would inform a constructional analysis.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1703.03771,
title = {Coping with Construals in Broad-Coverage Semantic Annotation of Adpositions},
author = {Jena D. Hwang and Archna Bhatia and Na-Rae Han and Tim O'Gorman and Vivek Srikumar and Nathan Schneider},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.03771},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
Presentation at Construction Grammar and NLU AAAI Spring Symposium, Stanford, March 27-29 2017; 9 pages including references; 1 figure